Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [52]
It was a knapsack not unlike the one Mrs. Grey had given the lass. Inside she found a linen shift with long, full sleeves embroidered with flowers, a dark wool skirt and red vest, and a pair of scuffed leather shoes. All the things were worn soft, of good quality but not expensive. What horrified the lass was that they had obviously belonged to a girl of about the same size as she. Where had the owner of the clothing gone?
Underneath these everyday clothes was the worst thing of all. Wrapped in muslin was a wedding bunad that had never been worn. It was gorgeous, but in a far different way than the heavy velvet skirts and pearl-encrusted bodices of the troll gowns. The skirt of the bunad was black wool, with a deep hem of embroidery in bands of red and blue and green and yellow. The red vest had silver buttons up the front, and the white blouse was of fabric as fine as gauze. There was even a set of silver earrings, and a circular brooch with dangling medallions. There were white stockings and a pair of black buckled shoes that were too stiff to have ever been worn.
The lass sat on the floor in the middle of the dressing room and cried over those shoes. Some other young girl had come here, to this cold palace of ice, expecting to be made a bride. But what had happened to her? Had she died? Had she tried to escape across the snow plain? Or pined so for her family that she had wasted away? Or maybe she had just disappeared one day, like Erasmus.
Picking up the everyday vest, the lass saw that there was a single long hair clinging to the back of the wool. It was so pale as to be almost white, but when she held it up to the light, it caught glints of gold.
She coiled the hair carefully around one of the buttons of the wedding bunad, so that it would not be lost. Her sobs faded to hiccups, and Rollo licked the tears from her face.
“It’s just some clothes,” he said, confused.
“Don’t you understand? Some other girl was brought here, and she left without her things. That means that she’s . . . dead . . . or something.” A fresh flow of tears ran down her cheeks. “I think . . . it must have been Hans Peter’s Tova.”
Rollo sniffed the clothes. He shook his head over the bunad; it was too new to smell like anything other than wool and maybe the lingering scent of the hands that had made it. He snuffled the everyday clothes more thoroughly.
“She was human,” he reported. “And clean, very clean. She liked strawberries and books. And Hans Peter. And she didn’t die in these clothes.”
“Are you sure?”
Rollo sniffed the shift again and then nodded his head. “They smell like isbjørn, but not our isbjørn. And they also smell like Hans Peter. Or at least this does”—he nosed the shift—“faintly.”
The lass caught up the shift and gave it a good sniff herself, but couldn’t smell anything. Well, she smelled dried flowers from the wardrobe, and leather from the knapsack. But no strawberries, or books, or Hans Peter.
“Your nose isn’t that good,” Rollo reminded her, with just a trace of smugness.
“It was Tova’s,” the lass said with certainty. “When Hans Peter was here there was a beautiful girl named Tova with him, and they loved each other very much.”
“Even I couldn’t smell all that,” Rollo said.
“But I can feel it,” the lass insisted. “I think she’s the one who embroidered the blue parts on Hans Peter’s coat. The red bits are some sort of enchantment, and Tova changed it.
“I wonder what happened to her, and to their isbjørn,” she finished, a final tear slipping down her cheek.
“Their isbjørn? ”
“You said that it smelled like one, but not ours.”
“Ye-es.” But now Rollo didn’t sound as sure as he had been. “Really, these smells are quite confusing. One sniff and it’s isbjørn, the next it’s Hans Peter. There’s a whiff of troll, too.”
“There is?” Again she lifted the shift to her nose, but again the smell eluded her. “What does it mean?” Her hands shook a little. “What did the trolls